Of course there was a large Chinese population in Virginia—it
is the case with every town and city on the Pacific coast. They
are a harmless race when white men either let them alone or treat
them no worse than dogs; in fact they are almost entirely
harmless anyhow, for they seldom think of resenting the vilest
insults or the cruelest injuries. They are quiet, peaceable,
tractable, free from drunkenness, and they are as industrious as
the day is long. A disorderly Chinaman is rare, and a lazy one
does not exist. So long as a Chinaman has strength to use his
hands he needs no support from anybody; white men often complain
of want of work, but a Chinaman offers no such complaint; he
always manages to find something to do. He is a great convenience
to everybody—even to the worst class of white men, for he bears
the most of their sins, suffering fines for their petty thefts,
imprisonment for their robberies, and death for their murders.
Any white man can swear a Chinaman’s life away in the courts, but
no Chinaman can testify against a white man. Ours is the “land of
the free”—nobody denies that—nobody challenges it. [Maybe it is
because we won’t let other people testify.] As I write, news
comes that in broad daylight in San Francisco, some boys have
stoned an inoffensive Chinaman to death, and that although a
large crowd witnessed the shameful deed, no one interfered.
There are seventy thousand (and possibly one hundred thousand)
Chinamen on the Pacific coast. There were about a thousand in
Virginia. They were penned into a “Chinese quarter”—a thing
which they do not particularly object to, as they are fond of
herding together. Their buildings were of wood; usually only one
story high, and set thickly together along streets scarcely wide
enough for a wagon to pass through. Their quarter was a little
removed from the rest of the town. The chief employment of
Chinamen in towns is to wash clothing. They always send a bill,
like this below, pinned to the clothes. It is mere ceremony, for
it does not enlighten the customer much.
Their price for washing
was $2.50 per dozen—rather cheaper than white people could
afford to wash for at that time. A very common sign on the
Chinese houses was: “See Yup, Washer and Ironer”; “Hong Wo,
Washer”; “Sam Sing & Ah Hop, Washing.” The house servants, cooks,
etc., in California and Nevada, were chiefly Chinamen. There were
few white servants and no Chinawomen so employed. Chinamen make
good house servants, being quick, obedient, patient, quick to
learn and tirelessly industrious. They do not need to be taught a
thing twice, as a general thing. They are imitative. If a
Chinaman were to see his master break up a centre table, in a
passion, and kindle a fire with it, that Chinaman would be likely
to resort to the furniture for fuel forever afterward.
All Chinamen can read, write and cipher with easy
facility—pity but all our petted voters could. In California
they rent little patches of ground and do a deal of gardening.
They will raise surprising crops of vegetables on a sand pile.
They waste nothing. What is rubbish to a Christian, a Chinaman
carefully preserves and makes useful in one way or another. He
gathers up all the old oyster and sardine cans that white people
throw away, and procures marketable tin and solder from them by
melting. He gathers up old bones and turns them into manure. In
California he gets a living out of old mining claims that white
men have abandoned as exhausted and worthless—and then the
officers come down on him once a month with an exorbitant swindle
to which the legislature has given the broad, general name of
“foreign” mining tax, but it is usually inflicted on no
foreigners but Chinamen. This swindle has in some cases been
repeated once or twice on the same victim in the course of the
same month—but the public treasury was no additionally enriched
by it, probably.
Chinamen hold their dead in great reverence—they worship
their departed ancestors, in fact. Hence, in China, a man’s front
yard, back yard, or any other part of his premises, is made his
family burying ground, in order that he may visit the graves at
any and all times. Therefore that huge empire is one mighty
cemetery; it is ridged and wringled from its centre to its
circumference with graves—and inasmuch as every foot of ground
must be made to do its utmost, in China, lest the swarming
population suffer for food, the very graves are cultivated and
yield a harvest, custom holding this to be no dishonor to the
dead. Since the departed are held in such worshipful reverence, a
Chinaman cannot bear that any indignity be offered the places
where they sleep. Mr. Burlingame said that herein lay China’s
bitter opposition to railroads; a road could not be built
anywhere in the empire without disturbing the graves of their
ancestors or friends.
A Chinaman hardly believes he could enjoy the hereafter except
his body lay in his beloved China; also, he desires to receive,
himself, after death, that worship with which he has honored his
dead that preceded him. Therefore, if he visits a foreign
country, he makes arrangements to have his bones returned to
China in case he dies; if he hires to go to a foreign country on
a labor contract, there is always a stipulation that his body
shall be taken back to China if he dies; if the government sells
a gang of Coolies to a foreigner for the usual five-year term, it
is specified in the contract that their bodies shall be restored
to China in case of death. On the Pacific coast the Chinamen all
belong to one or another of several great companies or
organizations, and these companies keep track of their members,
register their names, and ship their bodies home when they die.
The See Yup Company is held to be the largest of these. The Ning
Yeong Company is next, and numbers eighteen thousand members on
the coast. Its headquarters are at San Francisco, where it has a
costly temple, several great officers (one of whom keeps regal
state in seclusion and cannot be approached by common humanity),
and a numerous priesthood. In it I was shown a register of its
members, with the dead and the date of their shipment to China
duly marked. Every ship that sails from San Francisco carries
away a heavy freight of Chinese corpses—or did, at least, until
the legislature, with an ingenious refinement of Christian
cruelty, forbade the shipments, as a neat underhanded way of
deterring Chinese immigration. The bill was offered, whether it
passed or not. It is my impression that it passed. There was
another bill—it became a law—compelling every incoming Chinaman
to be vaccinated on the wharf and pay a duly appointed quack (no
decent doctor would defile himself with such legalized robbery)
ten dollars for it. As few importers of Chinese would want to go
to an expense like that, the law-makers thought this would be
another heavy blow to Chinese immigration.
What the Chinese quarter of Virginia was like—or, indeed,
what the Chinese quarter of any Pacific coast town was and is
like—may be gathered from this item which I printed in the
Enterprise while reporting for that paper:
CHINATOWN.—Accompanied by a fellow reporter, we made a trip through our Chinese quarter the other night. The Chinese have
built their portion of the city to suit themselves; and as they
keep neither carriages nor wagons, their streets are not wide
enough, as a general thing, to admit of the passage of vehicles.
At ten o’clock at night the Chinaman may be seen in all his
glory. In every little cooped-up, dingy cavern of a hut, faint
with the odor of burning Josh-lights and with nothing to see the
gloom by save the sickly, guttering tallow candle, were two or
three yellow, long-tailed vagabonds, coiled up on a sort of short
truckle-bed, smoking opium, motionless and with their lustreless
eyes turned inward from excess of satisfaction—or rather the
recent smoker looks thus, immediately after having passed the
pipe to his neighbor—for opium-smoking is a comfortless
operation, and requires constant attention. A lamp sits on the
bed, the length of the long pipe-stem from the smoker’s mouth; he
puts a pellet of opium on the end of a wire, sets it on fire, and
plasters it into the pipe much as a Christian would fill a hole
with putty; then he applies the bowl to the lamp and proceeds to
smoke—and the stewing and frying of the drug and the gurgling of
the juices in the stem would well-nigh turn the stomach of a
statue. John likes it, though; it soothes him, he takes about two
dozen whiffs, and then rolls over to dream, Heaven only knows
what, for we could not imagine by looking at the soggy creature.
Possibly in his visions he travels far away from the gross world
and his regular washing, and feast on succulent rats and
birds’-nests in Paradise.
Mr. Ah Sing keeps a general grocery and provision store at No.
13 Wang street. He lavished his hospitality upon our party in the
friendliest way. He had various kinds of colored and colorless
wines and brandies, with unpronouncable names, imported from
China in little crockery jugs, and which he offered to us in
dainty little miniature wash-basins of porcelain. He offered us a
mess of birds’-nests; also, small, neat sausages, of which we
could have swallowed several yards if we had chosen to try, but
we suspected that each link contained the corpse of a mouse, and
therefore refrained. Mr. Sing had in his store a thousand
articles of merchandise, curious to behold, impossible to imagine
the uses of, and beyond our ability to describe.
His ducks, however, and his eggs, we could understand; the
former were split open and flattened out like codfish, and came
from China in that shape, and the latter were plastered over with
some kind of paste which kept them fresh and palatable through
the long voyage.
We found Mr. Hong Wo, No. 37 Chow-chow street, making up a
lottery scheme—in fact we found a dozen others occupied in the
same way in various parts of the quarter, for about every third
Chinaman runs a lottery, and the balance of the tribe “buck” at
it. “Tom,” who speaks faultless English, and used to be chief and
only cook to the Territorial Enterprise, when the establishment
kept bachelor’s hall two years ago, said that “Sometime Chinaman
buy ticket one dollar hap, ketch um two tree hundred, sometime no
ketch um anything; lottery like one man fight um seventy—may-be
he whip, may-be he get whip heself, welly good.”
However, the percentage being sixty-nine against him, the
chances are, as a general thing, that “he get whip heself.” We
could not see that these lotteries differed in any respect from
our own, save that the figures being Chinese, no ignorant white
man might ever hope to succeed in telling “t’other from which;”
the manner of drawing is similar to ours.
Mr. See Yup keeps a fancy store on Live Fox street. He sold us
fans of white feathers, gorgeously ornamented; perfumery that
smelled like Limburger cheese, Chinese pens, and watch-charms
made of a stone unscratchable with steel instruments, yet
polished and tinted like the inner coat of a sea-shell. As tokens
of his esteem, See Yup presented the party with gaudy plumes made
of gold tinsel and trimmed with peacocks’ feathers.
We ate chow-chow with chop-sticks in the celestial
restaurants; our comrade chided the moon-eyed damsels in front of
the houses for their want of feminine reserve; we received
protecting Josh-lights from our hosts and “dickered” for a pagan
God or two. Finally, we were impressed with the genius of a
Chinese book-keeper; he figured up his accounts on a machine like
a gridiron with buttons strung on its bars; the different rows
represented units, tens, hundreds and thousands. He fingered them
with incredible rapidity—in fact, he pushed them from place to
place as fast as a musical professor’s fingers travel over the
keys of a piano.
They are a kindly disposed, well-meaning race, and are
respected and well treated by the upper classes, all over the
Pacific coast. No Californian gentleman or lady ever abuses or
oppresses a Chinaman, under any circumstances, an explanation
that seems to be much needed in the East. Only the scum of the
population do it—they and their children; they, and, naturally
and consistently, the policemen and politicians, likewise, for
these are the dust-licking pimps and slaves of the scum, there as
well as elsewhere in America.
